Contents

Eclipse Day Eclipse day dawned bright and mostly clear. After breakfast, I grabbed my binoculars, solar filters, and photographic gear, and boarded the bus to our eclipse site. The day before, the TravelQuest team had scouted out a location in Adventdalen (the Advent valley) south of Longyearbyen in which at eclipse time the Sun would hang in a notch between two hills. In most of the sites in or nearer to Longyearbyen, the Sun would only clear the mountains by a few degrees at most, which could present problems if clouds hugged the mountains. This proved a non-issue, as the few clouds that remained were safely to the north.

I set up my tripods next to two friends from my New York astronomy club. A nearby tent offered coffee, refreshments, outhouses, and—most of all—warmth, as the temperature hovered just above zero. The eclipse began; through my filtered binoculars, I saw the Sun with a small notch taken out of it.

As the eclipse progressed and the Moon took an ever-bigger bite of the Sun, I shot a series of close-up images with my Samsung NX300. The light grew soft. The Sun shrank and became the thinnest of crescents. Then Venus appeared to the left of the Sun in a rapidly darkening sky. A last glint of sunlight shone through a lunar valley, producing the aptly named Diamond Ring, with the shaft of sunlight as the diamond and the pearly glow of the corona, the Sun's atmosphere, as the band encircling the black disk of the Moon.

Then the Diamond Ring vanished and the eclipse was total, the world plunged into the deepest twilight, the Sun's luminous corona surrounding the Moon's pitch-black disk. The sky itself was a deep, incredibly rich blue, and the corona, which appeared to stream out from the Sun in multiple directions, a pale gold. I alternated between taking photographs and just gazing at the eclipsed Sun. At one point I became panicked because I couldn't find my glasses, so I looked with binoculars instead—and then I realized I was holding my glasses in my left hand! At last another Diamond Ring appeared, on the opposite side of the Sun from the first, to herald the end of totality, and the sky quickly brightened.

Glitches, Minor Regrets, and Relief My own experience was not without technical problems, two of them related to the extreme cold. At eclipse time, the temperature was reportedly -16C (3.2F), and it dropped to -22 (-7.6F) during the eclipse. Although I was well bundled up, I had misplaced one of my photographic gloves, which would have allowed me to fold open the tip to reveal my fingertips for easy manipulation of a camera's controls. I kept my right hand, for the most part, exposed, and by the end of totality, two of my fingers were hurting. Concerned about frostbite I packed up my gear, covered my hand, and headed to the bus. By the time I got there, the pain had disappeared.

The other problem was with batteries. My action cam failed altogether, and my iPhone stopped recording near the end of totality. But both of my mirrorless cameras had run out of juice all too quickly the day before, so I made a point of charging all my batteries and replacing those in my primary camera shortly before totality, and my main camera worked perfectly for the eclipse.

In hindsight, I would have made some changes in my photographic routine, to get some widefield shots, as well as a larger range of exposure times for my close-up shots. I would have spent more time just looking around me, not just at the eclipse but at the changing light to all sides. But these are very minor regrets. Above all, I was greatly relieved that I was finally able to see a total solar eclipse in all its glory, and in a wondrously surreal if forbidding landscape that I probably never would have visited had it not been for this event.

We in the Longyearbyen area were lucky to have such wondrously clear skies for the eclipse. I am not aware of anyone in Svalbard being clouded out for the event. Many great eclipse photos came out of the Longyearbyen area. Stan Honda, a professional photographer who is skilled at photographing astronomical landscapes, took a series of both wide-field and close-up shots of the eclipse. His exceptional wide-field image of the crowd viewing the Diamond Ring that marked the end of totality, was selected the following day as Astronomy Picture of the Day by the NASA site of that name. It also graces this article as the lead illustration. Master astrophotographer Tunc Tezel also posted several great images to his gallery on The World at Night; my favorite is Arctic Eclipse in Fulldome, a 360-degree panorama showing the entire sky during the eclipse. Miloslav Druckmüller, who processes multiple images covering a wide range of exposure times to create composites showing fine detail in the solar corona, made a remarkable image from photographs taken by his team.

The Faroe Islands were generally not so lucky. Although another TravelQuest group saw about half of the total phase, many expeditions were completely clouded out. A local doom metal band, Hamfero, got lucky with some intermittent sunshine to record a stunning live music video with the eclipse as a background.

2017's All-American Solar Eclipse Shortly after totality ended, I remarked to my friends "When's the next one?", knowing full well that the next total solar eclipse will be on March 9, 2016, touching the Indonesian islands of Sumatra, Borneo (Kalimantan), Sulawesi, and Maluku before tracing an arc across the western Pacific and ending northeast of Hawaii. I'm not counting on going, but haven't ruled it out, either.

The good news is that you shouldn't have to travel to the ends of the earth to witness a total solar eclipse (though there's something to be said for that experience) in the near future. On August 21, 2017, for the first time in 38 years, a total solar eclipse will touch the continental United States. In fact, it will cross the country, from Oregon to South Carolina. The Moon's shadow makes landfall near Newport, Oregon at about 10:15 local time, then crosses parts of Oregon, Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, Nebraska, Kansas, Iowa, Missouri, Illinois, Kentucky, Tennessee, Georgia, North Carolina, and South Carolina. The shadow will depart the United States at 2:49 p.m., heading out into the Atlantic and then leaving Earth entirely. Although weather prospects generally favor the western United States, the eclipse will be slightly longer in the east (2 minutes 40 seconds on the centerline in Illinois and Kentucky, as compared with 2 minutes in Oregon).

North Americans living outside of the narrow track of totality will still observe a partial eclipse, with its magnitude (the percentage of the Sun obscured at maximum eclipse) decreasing the farther you get away from the path of totality. However, a partial eclipse, even a deep one, is but a pale shadow of a total eclipse, lacking the deep darkness, the visibility of the stars by day, the solar corona surrounding the dark disk of the Moon. If you have any interest in observing this eclipse, my advice is to get into the path of totality if at all possible. A total solar eclipse is a rare and extraordinary sight, one well worth the time and effort to go out of your way to see in its full glory.

About the Author

As Analyst for printers, scanners, and projectors, Tony Hoffman tests and reviews these products and provides news coverage for these categories. Tony has worked at PC Magazine since 2004, first as a Staff Editor, then as Reviews Editor, and more recently as Managing Editor for the printers, scanners, and projectors team.
In addition to editing, T... See Full Bio

Get Our Best Stories!

This newsletter may contain advertising, deals, or affiliate links. Subscribing to a newsletter indicates your consent to our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy. You may unsubscribe from the newsletters at any time.